The bureau’s annual report, which breaks hate crimes into several categories, lists 14 such crimes in Pasadena last year, compared with eight in 2005.

Of those, five were racially motivated; two involved people targeted because of their religion; one involved a crime based on the victim’s sexual orientation; and six hate crimes involved people attacked because of their ethnicity.

The “race” category included crimes against African American, whites, Asians and Pacific Islanders, Native Americans and Alaskan Natives and those of mixed racial backgrounds. The category of “ethnicity” involved crimes against Latinos and other ethnic groups, FBI officials said.

In Pasadena, ethnic-based hate crimes increased the most – from two in 2005 to six last year. The five hate crimes involving race-based attacks mirrored 2005’s total.

Pasadena Police Department spokeswoman Janet Pope Givens said the increase in ethnicity based hate crimes might be due to a surge in what local police have termed “youth street crimes” in 2006.

But many of those assaults, which often involved African Americans targeting Latinos, were not always hate crimes, Givens said. Some were robberies in which the victim or victims were Latinos and the robber or robbers were African American.

In order to classify such robberies and assaults as true hate crimes, investigators must determine that an assault was indeed motivated by ethnic or racial bias, she said. In several such cases, authorities have been successful in adding hate crime counts to the charges filed against defendants in court, she said.

“The increase could be attributable to the crimes where we were able to get the hate crimes enhancement,” Pope Givens said.

Since 2006, the number of “youth street crimes” have plummeted, Givens said. While 59 occurred last year, 20 have been reported so far this year, she said.

“This is not a phenomenon that’s exclusive to Pasadena,” Pope Givens added.

Indeed, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, MALDEF, said the FBI report shows that hate crimes against Latinos reached record levels across the nation in 2006.

“It’s a serious problem,” said John Trasvi a, MALDEF’s president and general counsel, who attributed the rise to anti-immigrant feelings.

He noted that Latino immigrants, particularly the undocumented, often have been targeted because robbers know that many undocumented immigrants typically cannot open bank accounts and usually carry cash.

That would suggest that such robberies were more like crimes of opportunity.

FBI spokeswoman Laura Eimiller said for a crime to be classified as a hate crime, the perpetrator or perpetrators must have targeted their victim or victims specifically because of their ethnicity, race, sexual orientation or religion.

“The added element is bias. If evidence indicates there’s a bias that motivated the crime, then it may be considered a hate crime,” she said.

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